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indoor Indoor peppers?

R

RJS

Banned
Hi, I am an avid pepper grower, and hate the fact that my potentially perennial Habaneros and Jolokia gets to die after the first couple frosts.

Any ideas, links, resources on growing indoors? What about varieties? Some better than others? Lighting, heat, etc? I don't wanna build a full blown greenhouse indoors if at all possible, anything that would do all right with just a grow light?

A pepper bush in my bedroom is the Holy Grail of pepper growing to me. I'd even give it a name and talk to it.
 
RJS said:
Hi, I am an avid pepper grower, and hate the fact that my potentially perennial Habaneros and Jolokia gets to die after the first couple frosts.

Any ideas, links, resources on growing indoors? What about varieties? Some better than others? Lighting, heat, etc? I don't wanna build a full blown greenhouse indoors if at all possible, anything that would do all right with just a grow light?

A pepper bush in my bedroom is the Holy Grail of pepper growing to me. I'd even give it a name and talk to it.
Click to expand...

I'm growing most of my Habaneros inside, in a little section of a storage closet I have sectioned off with Thermal Blankets (Reflective Mylar) and I have hung an array of 23 Watt (100 Watt Eq) CFLs and reflectors connected to a typical timer set to 18/6 (hours on/off) with two Box Fans, one is for the plants (lower) one is for the lights (upper) and these run 24/7.

They do REALLY great inside except for Fruit Set... Only the Orange Habaners seem to fruit inside and the Caribbean Reds need to be outside for a week or two to reach fruit load.

I rotate mine, I let them reach fruit load outside in east or west facing windows (I live in an apartment so I cant stick them outside on the ground and have no south side facing windows) then I move them inside my little light room, and the plants that are budding go outside to fruit and so on.

Since you are over wintering, you dont have to worry about fruiting...

You can choose any sort of lighting you want, I used CFL because I wanted a broad coverage since I had MANY plants. I use at least three CFLs hanging overhead each plant and I have 3 CFLs total spread evenly below the canopy of all the plants since CFLs dont penetrate the leaves very well.

All my plants are sitting on an old unused dining room table covered with heavy duty foil and protected with clear plastic.

Whatever you do, just make sure you have a fan in there (during warm days) and a space heater you can use on really cold days, depending on the heating in your home.

Also, potted plants tend to lose Magnesium from frequent watering, so I spray them and add some Epsom salt to the soil every two weeks or so. On top of that I spray them at least once a day with distilled water.

You might want to prune them back a bit, but I dont think it's really necessary with a decent lighting setup.

Heres what mine looked like on June 6th.

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I'm trying to dumb down your post for my digestion...The pertinent ideas I got, correct me if I'm wrong, are:
A: They won't fruit indoors,
B: Indoor growing for overwintering only, to be returned outdoors after last frost.
 
RJS said:
I'm trying to dumb down your post for my digestion...The pertinent ideas I got, correct me if I'm wrong, are:
A: They won't fruit indoors,
B: Indoor growing for overwintering only, to be returned outdoors after last frost.
Click to expand...

They will fruit some, but 90% to 95% or more of the flowers will drop. And the Orange Habaneros I have tend to set fruit under the lights way better than the Reds and some of them even reached full fruit load.

I'm using warm lights, 2700K I'm not sure if it's the spectrum or the warm nights caused by the long on time or what but putting them outside sets them and they do fine back under lights and the pods continue to grow and ripen as expected.

My flowers under lights seem to be under developed (shorter pistles, buds smaller in size) and they open too early and dont have much pollen.


All I can say is, under lights indoors you can get great looking and rather large bushy plants that produce very well when put outside. So if they get like this from seedling indoors, over wintering them should be no problem at all.
 
Got it. Now is that flower drop rate with manual pollination? What about the soil, some kinda heating pad or something, instead of the grow light being the main source of heat?
Now I am thinking of some kinda mini greenhouse. On a much smaller scale than you depicted. Just something to keep me happy till springtime.

P.S., I use a paintbrush to polimate my Bhut Jolokia outdoors and still have had a 100% flower drop rate, even though the plant is comparable in appearance and vitality to my Habaneros which are heavy producers. Any ideas what's wrong? I ordered the plant from a greenhouse in Florida, and got a late start on it, but it's already caught up to the Habaneros in size and blooms.
 
RJS said:
Got it. Now is that flower drop rate with manual pollination? What about the soil, some kinda heating pad or something, instead of the grow light being the main source of heat?
Now I am thinking of some kinda mini greenhouse. On a much smaller scale than you depicted. Just something to keep me happy till springtime.
Click to expand...

Yes with the Manual Pollination, unless your fans are very strong :)

About the heat, just make sure the temperature doesnt go below 45 F. 7.2 C.

Not sure about soil temp, it could be soil temp, vegative temp or both.

Early in the year I put an Orange and a Red Habanero outside and temperatures dropped to 40 F almost every night and needless to say, the plants no longer live :)

If you are making a little greenhouse, just make sure you have decent reflection around the plants because just having light from above will cause the lower leaves to drop leaving a thin canopy above.
 
Growing indoors is fun, too. Check the link in my signature to view my setup if you like. I am always growing some indoors besides the outdoors peppers. I found that Bird's Eye varieties are great producers indoors and easy to grow, too. They don't require much space either. Let me know if you need seeds!
 
Chiliac, That's awesome. Exactly what I'm aiming for, small scale and simple. I still have a theory that a heat pad of some sort under the containers in addition to the lighting might help in fruiting.
 
For fruiting they need lights rather than heat. A heatmat is very hepful for germination though. Feel free to try that though, woukld be good to know if it worked, but keep in mind that they'll need more watering.

Glad you like my setup, thanks for the nice words! I have little space and had to come up with something like that.
 
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